Abstract
Among many Taiwanese poets, Yu Kwang-chung has drawn special attention from the worldwide Chinese readers for his national consciousness and nostalgia poetry. Based on Stuart Hall''s theory about cultural identity, this paper attempts to historize Yu''s cultural identity, arguing that only after his journey to America in 1958 did he start to formulate a nostalgic turn in his poetry writing. Under the influence of Romanticism, Yu''s early poetry expresses a yielding for freedom, adventure, and the infinite and never views the state of exile or out of place as a painful and remorseful experience. But as soon as he encountered the other''s discriminating gaze in the United States, he could not help but recollect collective cultural memories and conceive himself as a Chinese exile. Thus his nostalgia poetry, written during the stay in America, demonstrates a narrative pattern, always starting from the scenery at the present to the hometown in the past. Here and there, the present and the past coexist and penetrate each other and then constitute a contrapuntal structure and two-centered frame of reference for interpreting the new experiences. This paper then argues that writing nostalgia poetry is not only a necessity for expressing one''s longing for the country and hometown, but also a surviving strategy for articulating the triangle relation of hometown, alien land and one''s self-identity. Writing self-identity therefore signifies a commitment and a decision, a commitment to the country of the origin and a decision to refuse the lure of the new home. Ultimately, to be an exile and to write about one''s nostalgia are reciprocal and interdependent.